Versal Journal

July 25, 2013

Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 11.Kristen Gleason lives in Grass Valley, CA. Her work can be found online and in print.

Tell us about your writing process. Make sure to lie about at least ((two)) things.

To be able—one must—wrote August Strindberg—“be like a hunter, who in his need chops off his dog’s tail, and after eating the flesh himself, offers the dog the bones, his own bones.” He may have been lying a little as I am when I say that this is what it’s like. But it is.

Or—to be able—I must—be like a grandfather bursting over and over again into my own room, uninvited.

Or—hey—blackhole crutchsink and send it to my twin.

What's the longest you've ever gone without sleeping? Why (if you can share...)?

Two months in the midnight sun, bees big as cotton balls.

What's one well-known and one little-known lit mag currently doing ((amazing)) work?

What can you tell us about Holland other than ((tulips)), clogs, red lights, and drugs?

Wim, I hope I’m not betraying you, but you asked me to believe that Holland is crowded and loud and that everyone living there dreams of a countryside that does not exist!

If your piece in Versal could be paired with any art work, what would it be?

Britta Marakatt Labba’s 25-meter-long embroidered mythology of the Sami people, which used to hang on the wall of a wide passageway at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway.

What dirty secret would you like to tell us?

((There’s a spot in the mountains where a tube is swallowing a waterfall. The mouth of the tube is thrust against stone and bolted there. A pig lives in the shadow of the tube in a pen made of rebar and string.))

Most unbelievable place you've ever been to? ((Why?))

These photographs of Tromsø were taken by my friend Ryan Johnson.

Do you have a philosophy of writing? Can you condense it into 30 words?

Dooitt for Deep Dent.

What's your playlist look like these days?

Bernie Krause’s Distant Thunder (Nature Company)

What book is so unbelievably mind-blowing that it makes you want to stop writing?

I often want to stop writing, not because of books.

Adventures in the Skin Trade by Dylan Thomas; The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector; Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles; The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, etc.

On The Newlywed Game, contestants were asked what vegetable they think they are. What's your totem vegetable?

Not my spirit, but my spouse: cauliflower.

Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.

I don’t remember! But I can speak up about doughnuts. Nabil Kashyap had a poem in Versal 6, which Brandon read while eating doughnuts in Seattle. When I lived in Montana, Nabil and I lived in the same house. Early one morning while I was sleeping, he entered my room holding a bowl of mini-doughnuts, fresh and hot from their fat bath, and a little dunker-tub of maple, and I was not as happy as I should have been because I was asleep. Thank you, Nabil. And Versal.

July 18, 2013

Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 11. Joey De Jesus has a B.A. from Oberlin College and a M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. His work has appeared in Antiphon, The Cortland Review, Dislocate, Kin Poetry Magazine, LUMINA and The Nervous Breakdown. He currently lives in New York. You can find more info at dejesussaves.wordpress.com or follow Jesus on Twitter.

Photo by: Thomas Sayers Ellis

Tell us about your writing
process. Make sure to lie about at least two things.

Most of the time I spend
writing is underground, either on the subways or in my basement bedroom. I tend
to write soon after waking up. I read a lot of poetry that I do not like so as
to know what not to do. My poems are all hanging on my bedroom walls so that
I’m always ‘in the zone.’ I have a very difficult time determining when a piece
is finished. I’ve edited many into oblivion. I share almost every piece I write
with a posse for critique.

What's the longest you've
ever gone without sleeping? Why (if you can share...)?

I came a bit unhinged one
January. I slept for maybe a couple hours every couple days for 18 days. I
remember the number of days precisely because on the 18th day I
slept.

What's one well-known and
one little-known lit mag currently doing amazing work?

I have to shout out to the
friends at Kin Poetry Journal. I
think they are doing a great job highlighting work you wouldn’t find in
journals coming out of MFA programs or with school affiliations. I don’t know,
I just have deep respect for formalists because I can’t do that—and their
features on Wendy Videlock and John Whitworth I thought were pretty
extraordinary. They’ve introduced me to a few poets I don’t think I would have
come to learn of otherwise, whose work I really admire. And a well-known
journal… hmm, I guess that is relative. I like do like Conjunctions and A
Public Space. Those two journals tend to feature poets I’m really into.

What can you tell us about
Holland other than tulips, clogs, red lights, and drugs?

I can tell you there is an
amazing young queer shaman living in Rotterdam. His name is Jasper Griepink. Seek
him out. Tell him I sent you. He is really special.

If your piece in Versal
could be paired with any art work, what would it be?

You know, I loved the
photographs that preceded the poem so much that I would have to say you made it
happen.

What dirty secret would
you like to tell us?

I can be shady.

Most unbelievable place
you've ever been to? Why?

The Makgadikgadi Pans. The
Makgadikdagi Pans of Botswana are a region of salt pans larger in size than
Switzerland. They were once the bed of an enormous saline lake. The ground is
composed of white soda-ash salts. Sua Pan is flat and grassless in every which direction
for as far as one can see. It feels like standing on another planet entirely. I
mean, it was nuts.

Do you have a philosophy
of writing? Can you condense it into 30 words?

I try not to have a
philosophy toward writing. I have approaches that I know work for me. I’ve
actively tried not to worry myself over the work or celebrity of other writers.
I try not to hold my standards to others too much (unless a writer is just
absolutely terrible).

What's your playlist look
like these days?

I’m living for
Junglepussy. I feel like I had been waiting for the Knife to put out Shaking the Habitual for a long time and
I’m loving the album—that Shannon Funchess is on it is an extra treat.
“Raghupati” and “Golden Glow” by Prince Rama have the highest play counts on my
iTunes.

What book is so
unbelievably mind-blowing that it makes you want to stop writing?

Caroline Bergvall’s Meddle English, Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire and Horse in the Dark by Vievee Francis are all so mind-blowingly
phenomenal they make me want to quit it. There are a number of books I think:
D. A. Powell’s Useless Landscape or a
Guide for Boys, d g nanouk okpik’s Corpse
Whale. And I have to praise Marie Howe’s Kingdom of Ordinary Time.

On The Newlywed Game,
contestants were asked what vegetable they think they are. What's your totem
vegetable?

I would want to say
“yuca,” because the word is so fun to say and it’s all cool and from my mother
island, but in all honesty my totem vegetable is probably the red bean—as in
rice and red beans. Maybe you can’t choose your totem, maybe your totem chooses
you.

Why did you send work to
Versal? Be honest.

The glitter.

No. I really loved volume
IX, which had Alice Notley in it. But, you know, aside from her, I didn’t
really recognize many of the poets. I remember the pieces to me were so
engaging and different from anything I’d really seen elsewhere, that I thought
‘this is a journal that prioritizes quality of the work over celebrity around
the poet’s names.’ I also remember feeling that the order in which the works
were presented seemed really curated even though they spanned various mediums,
genres and forms. That spoke to me. So, I believe I submitted to volume X and
then again to volume XI.

Tell us what you're
working on right now.

Right now I’ve got a few
projects in the works. I’ve got the first manuscript of poems that I am working
on, which includes the piece you all took. As of right now it’s looking like it
will be in three sections maybe, but I don’t want to talk to it too much but I
can sum it up maybe with “poems of bewilderment and rage.” Then, I have a
collection of spells, incantations and such titled “Hoax.” I’ve begun working
on a web project with an artist to make an interactive poem/website. And I’ve
been journaling ideas for a collection that takes place entirely in a video
game in the future. The idea of writing landscape poems (which is maybe my
comfort zone as a writer) for—like—virtually constructed landscapes presents a
number of possibilities to me.

July 11, 2013

Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 11. John Vanderslice teaches writing at the University of Central Arkansas. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of journals, including Seattle Review, Southern Humanities Review, Laurel Review, Red Booth, Sou’wester, and Crazyhorse. “The Dealer’s Brother” is a chapter from his forthcoming novel, Days on Fire. You can check out further work on John's website, where he discusses all matters Van Gogh and historical fiction related, or you can follow him on Twitter @JohnvanderJohn

Tell us about your writing process. Make
sure to lie about at least two things.

You mean
daily process or larger process?I’ve
always been a morning person, so I write in the morning, fueled by way too much
coffee and the knowledge that before too long the world wakes up and I’ve got
parental obligations to tend to.If the
coffee doesn’t work, I find that holding my palm over a match “fires” my
creativity.I’ve always been a writer
who drafts first in longhand and then enters the draft into the computer.That’s how I wrote “The Dealer’s
Brother.”It’s how I still write short
stories.Basically, I prefer that
sequence.I like the no pressure feeling
of writing with pen on paper.Sometimes
I even use crayon.You feel crayon on
paper in a tactile way that you don’t feel pen or paper.Plus, I’m pretty sure research has shown
that crayon opens up the right brain.However, I should say that the last three novels I’ve written—including
my post-apocolyptic/mixed species quadruped nightmare—have been straight from
the imagination to the keyboard.

What's the longest you've ever gone
without sleeping? Why (if you can share...)? If you mean voluntarily, my answer would be pretty dull.I’ve never been good at pulling
all-nighters.On the other hand, I’ve
suffered bouts of insomnia off and on in my life and once, a long time ago, I
think I may have been up something like sixty hours straight.The last time I spent a sleepless night I got
in a car accident the next day after falling asleep at the wheel.Trying not to let that happen again.

What's one well-known and one
little-known lit mag currently doing amazing work? As for well-known mags, I really like One Story.I’ve subscribed to it for years.They make some really interesting, eclectic
choices, regularly publishing stories in drastically different genres and
almost always of noticeably high quality.I also like that they publish utter newcomers, very established people, and
everyone in between.

As for little
known mags, I have to give a shout out to Angel
on the Freeway, a poetry magazine started just last year by one of our grad
students: John Mitchel.This thing is
John’s baby. There’s some really
startling stuff in there: razor sharp imagery and naked honesty.

What can you tell us about Holland other
than tulips, clogs, red lights, and drugs? Funny you should ask!One of
the best experiences of my life was spending six weeks in Maastricht in the
spring and early summer of 2001.(It was
the genesis of my interest in Van Gogh.)I adore the city and felt deeply
comfortable there.I really liked how close it was to other
countries—if you wanted to, you could take a bike ride to Belgium or German
y—and I enjoyed strolling the banks of the river Maas: crossing the bridge;
doing some window shopping; buying frites or a postcard or a waffle; coming
back across.I remember there was a
fantastic, and very cheap, gelato stand at the center of the old part of town. We bought a lot of gelato at that stand. My wife and I were there with our young
children and we feel like we got an especially unique view of Maastricht
life.We hunted out the parks and the
playgrounds; we happened once into a fundraising event for a local school.Places where nary an American could be
found.

If your piece in Versal could be paired
with any art work, what would it be?

I guess I
would have to say something by Toulouse-Lautrec, perhaps At the Moulin Rouge.Not
that that painting literally reflects any of the developments in my story, but
it suggests a social environment that I am trying to resurrect in my story: the
underbelly of late nineteenth century Paris, the center of the art world, a
place where too many painters and would-be painters were trying to compete for
the attention of too few dealers and forced to find comfort where they could
get it, whether that be at the Moulin Rouge or an overcrowded party or the arms
of a mistress.

What dirty secret would you like to tell
us?

I watched a lot
of bad tv as a kid.I’m talking stuff
like McHale’s Navy.

Most unbelievable place you've ever been
to? Why? I’d have to
say that no place has affected me quite as much, at least on first glance, as
the Camargue in Provence.It’s not just
that it’s beautiful—beautiful in way that you won’t find in the United
States—but that it’s so purely rural.This isn’t upscale, movie star Nice; this is farmland dotted by very old
houses, and it’s almost magically peaceful.

Do you have a philosophy of writing?Can
you condense it into 30 words?You
should work as hard as hell, and never make excuses for why you can’t, and
never stop trying to make your next book better than your last.

What's your playlist look like these
days?Well, I listen to a lot of Pandora, and as a
result I have bought a bunch of CDs in the last couple of years: mostly old
favorites that I want to reconnect with: Neil Young, John Hartford, Bob
Marley.On my iPod I mainly listen to
podcasts while I run every day.There’s
an awesome language-learning one I love called Coffee Break French.It’s
produced in Scotland.(Since I started
researching Van Gogh, I’ve been trying to learn French.)I also listen to NPR’s Selected Shorts and This
American Life.And a lot of audio
books.

What book is so unbelievably
mind-blowing that it makes you want to stop writing? A couple come to mind.One
writer who regularly blows my mind is John Barth.I think his collection On With the Story might be my favorite collection of all time and
his single best book.The story “Stories
of Our Lives” might be my favorite ever story.The narrator’s vantage point in that story is both unstoppably broad and
fiercely specific.Obviously ironic,
but also perfectly sincere, even sentimental.There’s a moment in the story in which a character picks up a wadded
piece of paper thrown by another character.I remember gasping when I realized that the piece of paper he just
picked up was a page torn from the very short story collection—in fact, the
very short story—in which he was presented as a character!Only Barth can get away with stuff like that,
but it leaves me speechless when he pulls it off.

Another book
I was so impressed by was Michael Chaban’s Kavalier
and Clay.His imagination is second
to none, and the man is never afraid of words.Some people I know detest him for that
reason.My reaction?Get over it.We’re writers.Words is what we
are about.If you don’t think so, maybe
you need to find another profession.(I
actually think they are just jealous.)

On The Newlywed Game, contestants were
asked what vegetable they think they are. What's your totem vegetable?

First thing
that came to mind is red bell pepper.(Is that a vegetable?)It’s sweet
at first taste and when eaten raw, but it’s not overly sweet.Most important, it’s a versatile
ingredient—good as an addition to almost anything.It also picks up a supple, surprisingly
complex flavor when you cook it.The
“real” red bell pepper takes some time to get to know.

Why did you send work to Versal? Be
honest.

Because you
guys are based in Amsterdam, and the protagonist of my story is one of the most
famous Dutchman of all time, it seemed like a natural fit.

Tell us what you're working on right
now.

I recently
finished the second draft of a novel that I started in January in a class I
teach called Novel Writing Workshop.I
ask the students to produce the first draft of a novel in one semester, and I
agree to do the same thing.To put
myself through what I make them do.Anyway, as a result I’ve written a novel about a man who, having lost
his own daughter when someone kidnapped, raped, and killed her, decides to get
his revenge on the world by kidnapping and killing someone else’s
daughter.He kind of chooses a girl at
random, and it turns out to be the daughter of a local Episcopal priest, a
woman whose life is already complicated enough.